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- Video - Apex Magazine Managing Editor Rebecca E Treasure on creating characters who live rent-free in your reader's mind
- Markets and contests with submissions open or opening soon.
- FRIDAY - Playful Character Creation: Invent Compelling People For Your stories led by New York Times-best-selling author William Alexander. Discount code!
- Care to drabble with us? Each week our drabble community writes 100 words (or they don't—their call) to a single-word prompt.
- This Week's Prompt. An interesting item from the news to provide you with fodder for your creativity. This week, fungus from Chernobyl that eats radiation?
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In this excerpt from her workshop, "6 Powerful Exercises To Polish Your Prose," Managing Editor at Apex Magazine, Rebecca E Treasure, explores how to avoid creating two dimensional characters and make them inhabit your reader's imagination.
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Markets and Contests
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Many thanks to Scribophile for sponsoring this week's open submissions. Scribophile is a free welcoming community of writers where you're guaranteed to get solid critiques on your work. You can also get 20% off your first purchase using coupon code APEX20.
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- ⛵️ Adventitious is open to submissions of short stories and novelettes for their inaugural issue. Send them work of up to 17,000 words before December 5th. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 🧗🏻♀️ Cliffhanger Magazine is open to submissions of adventure stories between 5,000 and 6,500 words. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 😴 DreamForge Magazine is open to submissions of short fiction on the theme of “Open Channel: The Art of Connection”. Send them work of up 7,000 words before December 31st. Note that they may close early if they reach their maximum number of submissions. They also welcome speculative poetry submissions, although they list no guidelines. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 🗞️ Curated by Costiuc is open to submissions of mystery, thriller, and suspense stories between 1,000 and 5,000 words. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 🪦 Burial Books is open to submissions of full-length crime and western novels. Send them a query letter and the first 20 pages. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 👑 5 Prince Books is open to submissions of full-length romance novels in a range of subgenres, including paranormal, historical, “beach”, and more. Send them a query letter, synopsis, and the first three chapters. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 📖 Ventura Press is open to submissions of full-length literary fiction and creative nonfiction. Send them an author bio, synopsis, and sample chapter. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
- 🤡 Golgonooza Magazine is open to submissions of “weird” fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Send them work of up to 15,000 words before December 14th. No submissions fee!
- ✈️ Strange Passage is open to submissions of short stories and novelettes of up to 20,000 words. No submissions fee!
- 📜 The Lit Nerds is open to submissions of hopeful short fiction, love letters, reviews, essays, and poetry. Flexible word counts vary across different categories. No submissions fee!
- 🐟 Fish Barrel Review is open to submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Send them up to 3,000 words of prose writing or up to six poems before December 15th. No submissions fee!
- 👺 MENACE is open to submissions of transgressive fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Send them up to 10,000 words of prose writing or up to five poems. No submissions fee!
- 📝 Unlost is looking for submissions of “found poetry”, or poems built out of another text. Send them up to four poems before December 15th. No submissions fee!
- 🎊 confetti is open to submissions of short stories, personal essays, poems, and stageplays. Send them up to 7,500 words of fiction writing, up to 10,000 words of creative nonfiction, 30 pages of drama, or three poems. No submissions fee!
- 📰 Fiction on the Web is open to submissions of short genre fiction between 1,000 and 10,000 words. No submissions fee!
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Have you ever tried to write a complete backstory for each of your characters? Konstantin Stanislavski, the most famous acting teacher to ever live, is said to have insisted that every performer write down the full contents of their character’s medicine cabinet. Is that kind of exhaustive detail really necessary? Do your characters need medicine cabinets?
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National Book Award winner and best-selling author William Alexander is here to tell you that there’s a better way. This workshop will borrow better lessons from the theater to learn more playful techniques for creating new characters.
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A sense of play unlocks the subconscious and its limitless creativity. It also fosters an intuitive understanding of your characters, which is far more valuable than any list of isolated facts about them. Join us to learn wildly theatrical techniques for inventing imaginary people by playing a Surrealist parlor game.
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In this workshop you will:
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- learn character development techniques from the theater, made accessible and applicable to fiction writing;
- participate in game-based exercises that prompt unpredictable invention and creativity;
- discover playfully intuitive ways to connect with your characters, which in turn brings them to life on the page.
You’ll leave this workshop with a faster, more creative, more effective, and more fun way to craft the people who inhabit your stories!
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DATE: December 5, 2025 – Friday
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TIME: 2PM ET | 1PM CT | 12PM MT | 11AM PT | 18:00 UTC
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RUNTIME: Approximately 90 minutes
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Each week our drabble community writes 100 words (or they don't—their call) to a single-word prompt. No fame. No fortune. Just fun. Well, maybe a teensy bit of fame if you count the animated adaptations we create and share on social media. Check 'em out on our YouTube channel and Bluesky.
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This Week's Prompt
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Mold found at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster appears to be feeding off the radiation. Could we use it to shield space travelers from cosmic rays?
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Thank you so much for being a newsletter subscriber. We love our supportive, weird, and wonderful community. Don't hesitate to reply to this email if you have something to tell us. I read every email and will respond.
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